Drug Industry Control of Medical Research

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  May, 2001  by Jule Klotter

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On 7/08/2000, Australian Broadcasting Corporation's news and current affair TV show Lateline aired a program on the drug industry's influence on medical research. In an interview for the program, Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, presented a very critical view of current medical research. She emphasized that the bond between drug companies and researchers at academic medical centers has become very tight. Researchers are very dependent upon drug company money, and their results show it. Dr. Angell said, "...it's been shown that researchers with such financial connections publish work more favourable to the drug company's products than do researchers who have no such connections." In addition, most researchers focus on drugs, because that's where the money is, rather than looking at the causes or mechanisms of a disease.

Drug company influence has extended far beyond simply funding research; drug companies literally control medical research and the results that reach the public. Dr. Angell said, "The drug companies increasingly design the studies. They keep the data. They don't even let the researchers see the data. They analyse the data. They decide whether they're going to even publish the data at the end of it. They sign contracts with researchers and with academic medical centres saying that they don't get to publish their work unless they get permission from the drug company."

Although Dr. Angell is by no means against the use of pharmaceuticals, she is concerned that the hegemonic drug companies are distorting the practice of medicine by promoting research that focuses solely on the effect of pills. Dr. Angell told the interviewer that "...new doctors are learning that for every problem there is a pill, or two pills or 10 pills -- usually brand name pills...the drug companies present themselves as educating medical students, house officers, interns, young doctors. They troll the halls of the academic medical centres. They give away free samples. They give little lectures to the medical students, and that distortion in what medicine is, I think, has very serious long-range consequences." Now that drug companies are permitted to advertise their products to the general public in the US, the belief that a pill can cure every ailment has become even more pervasive.

Pharmaceutical companies constantly plead that the high prices they charge for their drugs are necessary to offset the high cost of research. Dr. Angell said that "drug companies spend about twice as much on marketing as they do on research and development. They make a lot of noise about the research and development cost, but they're really relatively modest, compared with their profits and with their marketing costs, which dominate their budgets in some sense, now maybe 40% of their revenues."

"Drug Influence" www.abc.net.au/lateline/s160431.htm

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